Monthly Archives: April 2013

In the beginning of June, the new Intel Haswell CPUs will be available. Besides the regular improvements like being faster, having better energy efficiency and having better graphics capabilities, these new CPUs will also include VMCS shadowing (Virtual Machine Control Structure Shadowing).

Basically it’s a feature that allows you to run a hypervisor (like VMware, Hyper-V, Xen Server) and create another hypervisor as a VM beneath it. This is also called nested virtualization.

Some of you might say, “Hey this is not new, I’ve already done this with VMware!”. The difference however is that the current method uses some sort of emulation that does not directly access the hardware. And even though it’s great for testing purposes, the performance is suboptimal.

With the embedded hardware supported VMCS shadowing in the new Intel Haswell CPU the nested hypervisor can directly access the hardware, which should improve performance. Also, it might even make it possible to use non-VMware hypervisors in a nested virtualization scenario.

Of course as always, we’ll just have to wait and see how the performance will be in real-life. It’s also not clear to me yet if hypervisors need to be updated to be able to leverage this option. Nonetheless, to me it sounds very promising and I look forward to playing around with it.

In yesterday’s blog post I mentioned that I was looking forward to being upgraded to the new Office 365 in the next 4 weeks.

I did encounter an issue however that I was not able to open files on SharePoint using the desktop version of Office 2013. I kept on getting the message: “call us overprotective, but we need to verify your account before opening this document”. This never succeeded and I couldn’t modify my file using Office 2013. The Office Web App version was working fine though.

These changes are in effect right now. In short this means that the E1 and K1 plans that previously were only able to read with the Web Apps have gotten the full Office Web Apps (view, edit, create). This replaces the old E2 and K2. So basically:

Old E1/K1 have gotten E2/K2 functionality at the same low cost.

Old E2/K2 customers will keep the same features, but at a lower cost (E1/K1).

Old E2/K2 will be replaced by E1/K1 since they will then have the same functionality.

The new situation has become like this:

New Office 365 Enterprise Plans overview

PS: I love the Office 365 service and I’m looking forward to the new Office 365 features that will be added when Office 365 will start using the Office 2013 (Wave 15) versions of SharePoint, Outlook, Lync, Office Web Apps. I’ve gotten a mail that I’m planned to be upgraded within the next 4 weeks, so more about that soon. I’m especially curious if my SharePoint customizations will continue to work.

What’s also interesting is that Apple is losing tablet market share to Google and Microsoft compared to Q1 last year:

My view on this:

Tablets are becoming increasingly more important.

Pricing is very important to tablet buyers since the Google Android tablets have been selling that well.

Apple needs to come up with something fresh if they want to maintain or even increase their market share.

Windows tablet sales haven’t been as bad as some believed. Of course there’s still a lot of room for improvement, but I think that it will keep gainimg market share. Especially when prices will become more competive and when the number of good apps increaes.

Windows 8 has been blamed for bad PC sales, but Apple Mac sales fell 7.5% as well. I believe it’s just that customers rather have tablets and smarphones instead of PCs. Also it might be possible that the PC market just has become saturated.

It’s a pity we often have to wait for new products like the Surface Pro, but at least it’s coming to the Netherlands. And the waiting will also be over pretty soon, since it will be available before the end of May.

Yesterday, my colleague Daniel Hass (Macastic blog) from Open Line and I have both passed the “OS X Server Essentials 10.8″ exam with scores of over 90%. Because we had already passed the “OS X Support Essentials 10.8″ exam, we’ve earned the title “Apple Certified Technical Coordinator (ACTC) 10.8” in addition to the “Apple Certified Support Professional (ACSP) 10.8” title. I prepared for the exam by: